“One of the most delicate of the performances consisted in making a top spin on the left hand, run up round the edge of the robe at the back of the neck, and down the other arm into the palm of the right hand, still spinning. Another, again, was to toss a spinning-top into the air and catch it on the hem of the sleeve without letting it fall. A third was to fling it high in the air and catch it on the bowl or the angle of a Japanese pipe, pass it behind the back, flinging it to the front, and then catch it again.” Certainly an importation of Japanese top-spinners would make the fortune of any Barnum who could induce them to leave their country with the certainty of their being obliged to rip themselves up on their return. Let us hope that the discontinuance of this last trick may be one of the first-fruits of the introduction of Western civilisation into Japan. MRS CLIFFORD’S MARRIAGE. PART II. CHAPTER VI.—THE RESULT. When the newly married people returned home, after an absence of about two months, the new rule soon but gradually made itself felt at Fontanel. Though Mr Summerhayes had for a long time been the inspiring influence there, there was still all the difference between his will as interpreted by Mrs Clifford and his will as accomplished by himself. Of the two, it must be allowed that the retainers of the family preferred the cordial, kind, inconsistent sway of poor Mary to the firm and steady government of her new husband; and then everybody had acknowledged her right to rule, which came by nature, while every soul secretly rebelled against his, which was a kind of contradiction to nature. Mr Summerhayes’s path was not strewn with roses when he came back to Fontanel; then, for the first time, he had the worst of it. After she was fairly married, and everything concluded beyond the possibility of change, Mary, like a true woman, had found it quite possible to forget all her previous doubts and difficulties, and to conclude, with that simple philosophy which carries women of her class through so many troubles, that now everything must come right. It was no embarrassing new affection now, but acknowledged duty, that bound her to her husband, and she would not contemplate the possibility of this duty clashing with her former duties. So she came home, having fully regained the composure of her mind, very happy to see her children again, and utterly forgetting that they had not yet become accustomed, as she had, to look upon “Cousin Tom” as the head of the house. But it was now that gentleman’s turn to suffer the pains and penalties of the new position which he had taken upon himself. He was fully conscious of all the troubled sidelong glances out of Loo’s brown eyes; and when Charley burst into the house in schoolboy exuberance at Easter, for his few days of holiday, Mr Summerhayes noted the gulp in the throat of the Etonian,